Pinterest now lets you create sections within your boards to further tidy up ideas

1 month ago

1 Views

3 Min Read

Pinterest serves as a pretty good place for users who are looking to plan large-scale projects, like outfits for big events, home design or even life moments like a wedding or a 50th birthday party — and now the company is looking to make that even easier by introducing a more powerful way to keep those batches of ideas, well, tidy.

The company today said it is introducing what it’s calling board sections, which gives users a way to slice a bigger idea — like a wedding — into smaller components while sitting on the same board. Those kinds of big events can turn out to be huge life moments, and very costly, and Pinterest definitely wants to be the home for them as they are times when users are deeply engaged with the service and spending a lot of time on it.

Think of this new feature like a board-within-a-board. Pinterest says it was the top requested feature of all time, and that’s probably for good reason. Pinterest is built out of a psychology based on tidying things up and keeping things organized in one spot. So adding another abstraction layer to the process of sticking everything onto a board makes a lot of sense for a subset of users who are more aggressive about keeping their ideas in some logical flow.

If you’re planning a wedding, for example, there are a ton of moving parts. You probably have to think about what your venue wants to look like, what you’ll want to wear and flower arrangements (if the last one is Your Kind of Thing). For big events where you want to dive immediately into search-and-destroy mode, like a wedding — and especially ones where you want to involve friends — having a central hub for everything makes a ton of sense just from a pure efficiency point of view.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said at TechCrunch Disrupt SF that the feature had entered a beta around September and would be rolling out soon — which is really a very Pinterest move as product changes tend to go through an extended testing phase before they hit the rest of its 200 million monthly active users.

This is also probably going to be another opportunity down the line not only for discovering new products as you dive deeper into niches and find new homes for them, but also capturing a lot of intent for brands and marketers. Drilling all the way down to what kinds of shoes you are looking to wear for your wedding signals a ton of user intent around those kinds of products, and that’s something that Pinterest could potentially capitalize when looking to build out its ad products.